The Incompleat Nifft

by Michael Shea

  But Costard proved evasive; specifically, he avoided direct answers about the abrasion on his head, which we felt almost certain he had suffered while he was tapping, and thus concerned us very closely. At last Barnar lost his temper.

  "Out with it, Costard, at once! Tell us the circumstances, or we abandon you on the instant!" Costard stood blinking and gaping at his uncle's anger. At this point we were all standing at the very mouth of the gangway, which was the narrow, steeply inclined shaft down which we were to ride a wheeled bucket-car to the larval chamber.

  Barnar and I were now fully outfitted for tapping, and were both feeling most keenly mortified by the personal indignities this outfitting had inflicted on us. We were near naked, clad only in stout buskins, leathern short-kilts, and bandoliers that bore our gear and weapons. And we were dyed. Our hair, skin, clothing, weapons—every square inch of us—was dyed a screaming-bright orange. We'd had to step into a tub of the tint, like plods into a tick-dip. We had known—who does not?—of this practice. It is only this strange "hole in the eyes" of Behemoth, the giants' perfect blindness to orange (or to the color that orange becomes in the bluish light of the Nest) that makes tapping possible in the first place, and potentiates the whole sap industry. This defect in Behemoth's vision has, time out of mind, profited humankind and their livestock the world over.

  But knowing of the dyeing was nothing like suffering it—nothing like standing there at the gangway half naked and pumpkin-hued, gaudy as carnival clowns in the morning light that streamed through the rafters of the mine's main building. To stand thus chagrined and discomfitted, on the very point of being bucketed down a dark shaft to the mountain's bowel—to stand thus on the brink of our peril and still be denied by Costard the information we sought, was too infuriating.

  "You will tell us," Barnar boomed, "precisely how you received those abrasions to your head, or we will now and forever leave your mine to its fate! You were picked up, were you not? Though dyed, you were seen, and seized by a Behemoth? Why did this occur?"

  "I slipped," said the young man with frigid dignity, "in some larval excrement."

  We shortly had the gist of it from the testy young man. Costard, after his little fall in some excreta, had neglected to wash his boots, whose movements then grew visible where the fecal stains obscured their dye. One of the ever-vigilant Nurses who feed and tend the larvae had rushed to devour him as a brood parasite, and Costard had burst his flask of brood scent (a precautionary measure every tapper goes equipped for) at the last possible instant. Doused with this aroma, an unlucky tapper is instantly perceived by a Behemoth as an infant of its own kind, and is tenderly reinstalled among the larval shoals. That Costard had received only such minor lacerations as he suffered was testament to the finesse of a Behemoth's giant jaws in the handling of so relatively minute a morsel as a man.

  We found it most vexing that Costard would have allowed his personal vanity to deny us the useful lesson to be drawn from this incident: we must be alert to the danger of casual befoulments of our persons, for such besmirchings had power to make us fragmentarily visible to the titans we robbed.

  Too soon arrived the moment when we must step down into the bucket-car, and divest ourselves of sky and sunlight, of winds and rains and stars. But before Barnar slid the hatch-cover over us, he could not forbear a final scolding of his nephew. "Look that you take full advantage of Bunt's generously offered help," he admonished. "We'll have our hands full getting the knack of it below—things must go smoothly up here." Costard's frigid nod was not reassuring. He still regarded Bunt with a look of unappeased distrust, as if the young ass sensed some dissembled opponency in the hive-master's unfailing affability and compliance.

  "Look here, Costard," I put in. "Accept the help Bunt offers. You need help. Doesn't the failure of this once-great concern—" (and here I thrust an arm up from the bucket, and swept it at the empty building around us) "—suggest to you that perhaps you have shown some ineptness in your management of this mine?"

  Costard stood apalled, thunderstruck, his wildest imaginings outdone by this grotesque suggestion.

  "Enough!" boomed Barnar. "Let's be down and have done. Two weeks, no more, Nephew! Ready, Nifft?"

  "I am," I sighed. Barnar pulled shut the gangway door. The pulleys fed us rattling down into the dark.

  The stony sinus that swallowed us breathed a faint organic stench, a lair-smell that grew stronger the deeper we sank. Some years before, and some hundreds of leagues away, Barnar and I had made another trip together under Kairnish mountains (as recounted in The Fishing of the Demon-Sea) and it was an experience we were both remembering as we stood sinking into that creaking, rattling darkness.

  But now it was decidedly not a demon aura we sank into. The Nest smell was a more vital fetor that breathed of fecundity and relentless energies. Our descent felt not like an infernal entombment, but rather like entering the domain of deities, where an elemental vitality surged and swarmed.

  When we clanked to a stop we had long expected it, as the Nest-aura hummed ever more strongly around us, yet the actual jolt of arrival sent a pulse of fear through me.

  There before us was a rectangle delicately outlined in faint blue light: the hatchway to the larval chamber. I groped, and found the latch, and thrust the hatchway open.

  Only when I felt the pang of anticlimax did I learn the pitch of my expectancy. Here were no giants, but only an equipment-filled nook, a deep natural recess in what must be the wall of the nursery chamber. Here, in our operations center, were racks of tools, supply lockers, bales and boxes of provisions, a pair of hammocks. All were orange like ourselves—or rather, in the pale blue light of this place, were of a smoky, smouldery hue that matched our own.

  "Come on then!" I blurted. We all but ran out into the chamber, in haste to front our fears, and have them faced.

  Human constructions, even the greatest of wizard-raised manses, are utterly dwarfed by even one chamber of Behemoth's fashioning. A luminescent fungus marbled the walls and limned the chamber's vastness with its cyanic sheen.

  Even empty, that great void of chewn-out stone would have stunned us by its scope alone. But filled with that larval trove. . . ? By Crack, Key, and Cauldron! Our hair stood up upon our bodies! Each pale grub was as big as a trading sloop, and shoals of them shimmered in that great lagoon of blue light, their obesities heaped in glossy hillocks, like seadogs sunning on rocks. In the rich gloom, barrel-ribbed and oily-bright, the numberless larvae looked to be exactly what they were: bulging casks of purest nutriment.

  "An adult! A Nurse!" Barnar seized my arm and turned me. The Nurse's hugeness swam nearer through the larval sea. She was bigger than an ocean-crossing galleon, and yet so eerily swift and nimble! Her complex jaws—black, antler-like mandibles—were delicately scissoring, mincing some fleshy mass they held. She tenderfooted through the nurslings to a point not distant from us, and thrust the masticated mass down into the supplicant jaws of a grub. The meal would be demon-flesh, of course.

  The grub fed greedily. Only the tapering head and tail ends of the grub were capable of moving very much; this one's tail wriggled in sympathy with her busy little black jaws at the other end.

  We stood long, and again long, gazing at the Nurses coming and going, and at the Lickers, almost as large, that patrolled the chamber walls, and fed the luminous fungus with their saliva. There was an ebb and flux to the ministrations of these adults, who were at times few and far, while at other times scores of them swarmed at once in view, each feeding grubs by the dozens.

  The torn demon fragments that these Nurses bore were received, we knew, out in the tunnels from the mighty Foragers who harvested the subworld far below. These piecemealed prey were sometimes still conscious, and gave voice, cackling and jabbering as they were borne to their doom in a larval gut. But, their infernal utterances apart, all this huge life moved in relative silence, with a whispery friction of chitinous abdomens, and a muffled click of tarsal claws on stone.

&n
bsp; We gazed and gazed, aghast. The brutal, plundering work we had come here to do seemed to us in those first moments to be the most arrant lunacy imaginable. How dared we slay the babes of such awesome brutes even while they came and went in plainest view? We stood frozen.

  When we essayed some movement, we were timorous and tentative in the extreme. We grew bolder by only the tiniest degrees. At length, though, when we had grown confident enough to dance and jig and wave our arms at a Nurse who stood not four rods distant from us, we saw in her eyes' black, faceted globes her utter nescience of our existence.

  We could no longer doubt our freedom to begin the awful work we'd come to do for Costard. Only after we had provided him with some sap could we absent ourselves on Bunt's far more lucrative errand. With fear and loathing, then, we turned to the task.

  The tap lines, or "suck lines" as they are also called (all eight of them of course dyed orange), radiated like spiderlegs from the drill-hole's port in the chamber ceiling. The lines, at regular intervals along their lengths, were attached to ceiling bolts by tough, elastic tethers. Using a long, hooked pole known as a crook, a tapper could snag and pull down a given line over his chosen larva; when he was done with it and released it, or if it slipped from his control by any accident, the tethers snatched the line safely back up against the ceiling and out of harm's way, for though these hoses were invisible to them, Nurses blundering against them would quickly tear them down in a natural litter-clearing reflex.

  Our task, in brief, was to mount a grub with the help of steel climbing spurs, hook a line down from the ceiling, drive home the line's Spike (or "suck-nozzle") into the larval dorsum, and then use the signal cord in our operations nook to tell our partners topside to start pumping.

  We disburdened ourselves of our bandoliers of gear, and bore only our weapons strapped to our backs. We awkwardly lashed the climbing spurs to our insteps and calves, and hefted our crooks. "Well. . . ." My voice sounded hopeless, hesitant. "What about that smallish one there? It looks quieter too, less twitchy than the others."

  "Good idea," rumbled Barnar. "Start small and easy."

  Though by now we already felt deeply submerged in this inhuman realm, we did not truly enter Behemoth's world until that moment when we touched her flesh. The grub's hide was finegrained, translucent, and supple, like oiled parchment to our palms. We slipped and floundered till we learned to drive our spurs home fiercely. I was slow to believe in the young giant's indifference to my steel's negligible bite. Climbing her, I felt her slow, seismic heartbeat, and withal, something else: a gurgly unrest, as of troubled digestion, within her.

  At length, we stood unsteady on the grub's dorsal hump; the blubberous footing made us falter, and our first efforts with the Crooks were awkward. But at length we pulled down the nearest suck-line, with the suction spike on its tip. I gripped the line at mid-length to give Barnar a slack end. Two-handed, he raised the Spike high. "All right then," he grunted, and drove it home in the grub's blubbery hide.

  Our terrified suspense as to the outcome of this stroke may be imagined, as may the depth of our relief when we felt scarcely a tremor of response in the larva under our feet. Its heart thrummed steadily away; its guts gurgled perhaps a shade more vigorously, but that was the grub's sole reaction to the setting of the spike.

  One heartbeat . . . two . . . three thrummed away. We heaved a sigh and grinned at one another—and then I saw Barnar's jaw drop. I turned, squawked with terror, and hauled out Ready Jack from his scabbard between my shoulders.

  Almost too late, as a brambly black bug-shape, twice the size of the biggest 'lurk, loomed down on me, fangs high. I swung Jack with not an eyelash of space to spare, and clipped a fang and foreleg from the fearsome larval parasite—for such it was, a Sucking Star, the brood-bag on its abdomen swollen fat with eggs. It retreated scarce one step, rearing high, full of fight, its thorny palps darting for me. The Star was not about to quit this host; we had found the parasite with its bag full, just on the point of burrowing inside the luckless larva, there to hatch its eggs hidden from Nurses. With its clutch of eggs ripe and its habitat secured, the monster was not about to retreat. Barnar, freeing the spike and flinging the line ceilingward, swept out his mace, Jolly Breaker, and crippled two more of the Star's left legs. Then, seeing something I did not, he bellowed, "Nifft! Jump!"

  I have more than once dodged death by instantly heeding that tone of voice in my friend. I vaulted backwards and trod thin air. We plunged down into the shadows between two neighboring larvae. High overhead, a Nurse's globed eyes peered down. Her jaws plunged and reared aloft again, the Sucking Star between them, a writhing meal that dwindled as those jaws scissored.

  But this was the least of the Nurse's sanitary labors. She bent as if to sniff the flaccid grub, her antennae making dainty-quick inquiries. Then with jaws and forelegs she seized up her infested grub and began to devour her outright. The larva hung in that terrible grip, its slack meat like a moon above us that dwindled as we watched, while its rich larval sap drizzled and spattered down to the stone before us.

  Such was the remorseless, perfect economy of the Nest, the failed spawn consumed, regathered to the tribal body, not one pulse of energy wasted. The Nurse even lowered her jaws and grazed up the debris from the chamber floor. One of her eyeglobes hovered not five strides away from us. Her eyesight touched us, and possessed us not. When she was done, she rose and sped away.

  VII

  Where Aim and Act do inadvertent battle,

  Unsteady is the hand that robs the cradle!

  WE MADE a glum meal in our operations nook: execrable jerky, chalky hardtack, and sour wine. Apparently, the Superior Sap Mine, when it came to its workers' provisions, spared every expense. After this repast Barnar and I took a second stroll along the margins of the larval shoals. Our eyes were now alerted, and we began to discern significant details.

  To our more searching gaze, larval parasites proved not uncommon, once we learned their trick of attaching themselves to the shadowed under-surfaces of the grubs. And, as often as not, the parasitized grubs displayed clear symptoms of their affliction: flaccidity, dulled color, deficient size. A further discovery, once we had watched a while longer and strolled a little farther, was that the Nurses not infrequently seized and devoured parasitized larvae which showed these symptoms to a marked degree. This gave us double reason to identify and avoid infested grubs.

  After spotting another loathsome Sucking Star, its brood-bag swollen with eggs, in the very act of eating its way into its host's flank, I was moved to shudder, and remark, "Our competitor-parasites are an ugly lot."

  "Yet their work has exactly the same result as ours: an empty bag of larval skin."

  "Be as philosophical as you like," I rejoined, "but our vampirism is in every way more elegant than what these spiny horrors do. Ugh!"

  "Yes. Or at least, our way would be more elegant if we got around to doing it."

  But still we delayed, wandering through the larval trove, watching. We learned it was well to avoid areas where the natural nest-litter (larval droppings, and the feeding debris of such tougher demon parts as horns, barbs, hooves, spikes, and jaws) had not recently been cleared up. Nurses were likely to visit these untidy areas to devour the mess. Similarly, those parts of the chamber's walls where the patches of luminous fungi had most recently been nourished with the Lickers' spittle gave off a more robust light; these more visible areas seemed also likelier to draw Nurses.

  Having made these useful observations, we could no longer delay making our next attempt at tapping. Our second choice was a large, healthy-looking grub lying in a litter-free area that was not over-well illuminated, and was neighbored by equally healthy-looking grubs exhibiting no visible parasites.

  We spurred our way up her flank with creditable address, and trod pretty steadily across her dorsal hump. Determining the exact midline, I marked the spot with a spur-sliced "X" in her hide. Again our crooks plucked down the nearest suck-line. Again Barnar loft
ed the spike, and drove it home. The larva didn't even twitch. I dogged down the suck-valve with four little hooked pitons hammered into the hide.

  Tapping protocol now required me to stay on the grub, standing by the spike-valve and maintaining its security, while Barnar went back to our operations nook and used the signal cord to call for the pumps to start. I watched him go. I was uneasy standing alone atop the larva, and I kept a restless eye about me. I recalled certain most unsettling descriptions of the Crab Rat, the Sucking Star's chief parasitic competitor for Behemoth broodmeat.

  Barnar emerged from the nook, and waved to indicate that it was done, that the pattern of pulls on the signal cord, calling for suction on line three, had been performed, and acknowledged by the appropriate pattern of clicks from Costard.

  Long moments passed without event. It was a pause protracted enough to reawaken in me gloomy fears of Costard's incompetence in the above-ground part of the operation. I was about to signal Barnar to repeat his sending, when the suck-line surged powerfully, and the larva shuddered under me.

  The pump was geared far too high; it drank with such fierce greed that it deeply dented the grub's dorsum, and threatened my footing—the more so because the galvanized infant began wriggling powerfully. Dropping to all fours to keep from toppling, I bellowed, "Half power! Half power! The grub's throwing fits!"

  The instant I'd howled this out, I shrank in fear of what my outcry might draw down on me, coupled with the Nurse-beckoning effect of the grub's convulsions. For half an eternity I clung to that heaving hill of oily flesh.

  Then the pump cut off—in time, apparently, since none of the Nurses moving in the distance seemed to be heading my way. Now our victim lay far slacker than she had, almost a quarter diminished in her mass. She still twitched, but far more feebly than before. We waited, Barnar and I, our suspense uniting us across the chamber.